When the Frankfurt insolvency administrator Michael Frege tackles something, he does it with great meticulousness.
This can be illustrated particularly impressively using the example of his largest case to date: the insolvency of the German subsidiary of Lehman Brothers.
The partner of the law firm CMS Hasche Sigle and his team planned the procedure through with general staff, also using methods that were rather unorthodox for the administration industry.
Corinna Budras
Business correspondent in Berlin.
Follow I follow
Marcus Jung
Editor in business.
Follow I follow
At the height of the bankruptcy proceedings, more than 500 lawyers from different law firms were working on the case, so Frege organized the decision-making processes using military structures.
Criminologists and IT specialists processed the data to eliminate the information chaos.
He had the employees of his law firm trained by police psychologists.
This is how Frege described it more than two years ago in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung on the tenth anniversary of the major bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers.
In 2008 it was seen as the starting signal for a global financial crisis.
Best recommendation
The complexity of this case, the countless different interests and the disputes in court should be the best recommendation for the mandate that the 62-year-old lawyer has been taking on since Monday. At the request of the financial supervisory authority Bafin, the Bremen District Court appointed him on Monday afternoon as the insolvency administrator of the troubled Greensill Bank AG. That evening, CMS announced that they were already working flat out on the process and that an experienced restructuring team had been set up.
In addition to Frege as the insolvency administrator, the partner Charlotte Schildt, who are experienced in bank insolvency proceedings, and Joachim Kühne, a lawyer who is primarily recognized in matters of dispute and liability, are taking the lead in the prestigious case. In the insolvency administrator industry in Germany, only the mandate of the insolvent payment service provider Wirecard is currently considered comparable. Its insolvency administrator, Michael Jaffé from Munich, is said to have played a role right up to the end in the deliberations of the bank supervisors, who imposed a moratorium on Greensill Bank on March 3 because of the threat of overindebtedness. Ultimately, however, Frege was awarded the contract.
The insolvency of Greensill AG and the deep crisis of the British-Australian parent company now reach once around the globe.
So in the considerations, the international positioning of the chancellery association may also have played a role.
Frege is also known for his focus on bank insolvencies - and he can crack down on it.
This was also felt by the business law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, whose lawyers had written expert reports on “cum-ex” transactions for Maple Bank.
Insolvency administrator does not give up
The bank collapsed due to tax reclaims by the tax authorities, and Frege had to sweep up the broken pieces here too. He went to court against the top dog in the German law firm market. With his lawsuit, Frege increased the pressure, in the end Freshfields paid 50 million euros into the bankruptcy pot in a settlement.
So now the lawyer, with his weakness for the intricacies of American negotiation according to the Harvard principle, has to step into the breach again for the creditors of a bankrupt bank. With his success in the case of the German Lehman Bank, he set the bar so high that he can hardly skip it again: more than two years ago he was able to announce that all creditor claims will be 100 percent serviced. Even taxes of around 50 million euros could be transferred to the tax authorities. "Now this giant is buried and we rolled a rock over it," he said at the time. "May he never wake up again."